South Koreans elect liberal president after months of turmoil

Moon Jae-in reacts after exit poll results are announced at his party’s headquarters in Seoul and his two main rivals conceded defeat.

Moon Jae-in reacts after exit poll results are announced at his party’s headquarters in Seoul and his two main rivals conceded defeat.

Photo: SeongJoon Cho, Bloomberg

South Koreans elect liberal president after months of turmoil

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SEOUL — South Korea elected Moon Jae-in, a human rights lawyer who favors dialogue with North Korea, as president Tuesday, returning the nation’s liberals to power after nearly a decade in the political wilderness and setting up a potential rift with the United States over the North’s nuclear weapons program.

His victory caps a remarkable national drama in which a corruption scandal, mass protests and impeachment forced a South Korean president from office for the first time in almost 60 years, leaving the conservative establishment in disarray and its former leader in jail.

Moon, 64, a son of North Korean refugees, faces the challenge of enacting changes to limit the power of big business and address the abuses uncovered in his predecessor’s downfall, while balancing relations with the United States and China and following through on his promise of a new approach to North Korea.

His election also scrambles the geopolitics over North Korea’s nuclear arsenal. Even as the Trump administration is urging the world to step up pressure on Pyongyang, it now faces the prospect of a critical ally — one with the most at stake in any conflict with the North — breaking ranks and adopting a more conciliatory approach.

Moon has argued that Washington’s reliance on sanctions and pressure has been ineffective and that it is time to give engagement and dialogue with the North another chance, an approach favored by China. He has also called for a review of the Pentagon’s deployment of an antimissile defense system in South Korea that the Chinese government has denounced.

In a nationally televised speech before cheering supporters, Moon declared that he would “be a president for all the people.” He said he would work with political rivals to create a country where “justice rules and common sense prevails.”

The National Election Commission officially declared him the winner after a meeting Wednesday morning, the Associated Press reported. The election body said Moon gathered 41 percent of the votes, comfortably edging conservative Hong Joon-pyo and centrist Ahn Cheol-soo, who gathered 24 percent and 21 percent of the votes, respectively.

Shortly after the commission declared him as winner, Moon, as the new commander in chief of the country’s military, was briefed on the military’s preparedness against North Korea.

Moon’s position on North Korea is a sharp departure from that of his two immediate predecessors, conservatives who tended to view anything less than strict enforcement of sanctions against the North as ideologically suspect.

While he condemned “the ruthless dictatorial regime of North Korea” during his campaign, Moon also argued that South Korea must “embrace the North Korean people to achieve peaceful reunification one day.”

“To do that, we must recognize Kim Jong Un as their ruler and as our dialogue partner,” he said. “The goal of sanctions must be to bring North Korea back to the negotiating table.”